La citation du jour

Academics at public universities exemplify this arrogance when they defend their salaries: Public funds must shelter us from the free market, because the public is merely ignorant, even though they, uh, pay our salaries.

-Brad Edmonds

Décision importante prise au G20

Via le blogue de Paul Dontigny:

Décisions cruciales pour l'avenir au G-20

PAUL DONTIGNY JR . 28-06-2010

Selon une de mes sources institutionnelles des marchés financiers, une décision importante a été prise à l’unanimité lors des rencontres du G-20 de la fin de semaine.

Il paraîtrait que lors des prochaines conférences du G-20, une plus grande diversification sera EXIGÉE dans le choix des vins pour les repas ET pour les cocktails.

Les institutions financières ont immédiatement chargé plusieurs économistes et analystes d’analyser et d’extrapoler ce que cette décision, la plus significative du sommet, aura comme impact pour l’avenir des économies industrialisées et aussi pour les pays émergents.

Paul Dontigny Jr, M.Sc., CFA

L'hypocrisie des milliardaires

Via GuruFocus:

The Hypocrisy Of The Very Wealthy

Jun. 24, 2010

Author:

Dr. Paul Price

Fortune magazine’s July 5^th issue features a story about “The $600 Billion Challenge” from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to other billionaires. They are soliciting pledges from the other super wealthy people to give at least half of their net worth to charity in their lifetimes or at death.

These are the same billionaires that keep championing the Death Tax [Estate Tax] that will once again start confiscating up to 55% of large estates for those who die after December 31, 2010.



Estate taxes penalize ‘Good behavior’. Society is better off when its citizens save and invest, rather than spend and consume all their income. These retained earnings are used to fund growth in America. Those who have private wealth do not burden the rest of its citizens with supporting them in their retirement years.

What do our laws promote though? People who die with little to nothing in lifetime savings can pass their meager assets to their families or others of their choice with no additional federal tax burden. In others words… if you spend/squander all your net lifetime earnings you are rewarded with no taxes upon death.

On the other hand, those who save, invest and grow their net worth throughout their lifetimes arepenalized by up to 55% for not spending the money they did not consume.

When you reward bad behavior and chastise good behavior, which do you think you will get more of? This is very similar in our present social security system. We give disproportional benefits to those who contribute little to nothing into the system during their working lives while those who paid the most into the system during their working years will get much less back in relation to their personal contributions.

It is almost a given that ‘means testing’ is just over the horizon as a way to trim future social security deficits. When that takes full effect the people that paid in the very most will likely see little to nothing at all because they ‘don’t need’ the help. Our crazy system once again sends the message that you have to be crazy to work hard, save and invest. You’ll get much better treatment if you have nothing saved when you retire than you will if you have substantial assets and income.

Back to the headline topic. Gates and Buffett have pledged or given almost all their wealth to tax exempt foundations that effectively protect their enormous wealth from ever being taxed- in their lifetimes or even after their demise. Yet they want others, with much lower estate values, to have to forfeit over half their lifetime savings to the federal tax man.

Just as our politicians should be in the same health plans and social security system as they are dictating for us, billionaires should subject their estates to the same treatment they are touting for those with less than them (and without their teams of lawyers to avoid paying taxes).



Dr. Paul Price

'Sécurité' Orwellienne au sommet de bureaucrates

Le sommet du G20 de Toronto réunissant la crème des apparatchicks mondiaux, et qui coûte la coquette somme de 1G$ à nous les (très généreux) contribuables Canadiens, a transformé le centre-ville de Toronto en 'Guantanamo Bay' selon les dires des gens s'y trouvant.

Via The Globe and Mail:

Toronto Summit

Life inside the G20 ‘security zone'

Anthony Reinhart

From Wednesday's Globe and MailPublished on Tuesday, Jun. 22, 2010 10:06PM EDT

In the wood-panelled confines of Walter Beauchamp Tailors, the only thing resembling a customer was a stern-faced cop, letting his eyes take a walk over a table full of neckties.

Perhaps he was dreaming of a return to normal life after the G20, of a saner time when his Toronto police uniform will no longer include a riot helmet, when he won't have to look sideways at regular people going about their lives.

If so, the burly sergeant was in good company on Tuesday, as downtown Toronto denizens, typically an imperturbable lot, felt the clamp tighten that much more around Canada's urban heart in advance of this weekend's gathering of world leaders.

In and around the summit's core “security zone” – a term Orwell would surely appreciate – the insecurity was palpable, as residents, workers and visitors took in a series of tableaux that bordered on the absurd.

Police snack carts rolling down streets emptied of hot-dog vendors. Corporate logos magically missing from address plaques on buildings. Officers questioning people who linger a little too long at a street corner.

“I feel like I'm in Guantanamo Bay,” said Calvin Chu, a business analyst who works on Front Street, where a tall steel fence lines the road in front of his office.

His friend, Ricardo Basnayake, was equally miffed. “It doesn't give a good impression of who we are as Canadians, Ontarians or Torontonians.”

The proliferation of police, amid a marked decline in the number of office workers on the streets, certainly made an impression on Jeffrey Arbuckle as he ran a lunch-hour errand on Monday.

In an effort to liven up the porch of his television production studio near the security zone, Mr. Arbuckle had picked up a five-kilogram sack of potting soil. He was walking when two plain SUVs carrying eight police officers in tactical gear pulled up. They wanted to know what was in the bag.

While one officer checked his identification, another inspected the dirt and a third conveyed their concern: that he might be hauling fertilizer to a bomb-making lab.

After 10 minutes, Mr. Arbuckle got his dirt back, along with a warning that anyone in the area could expect similar scrutiny for the rest of the week.

“The cops have been nice so far, but it really feels like a war zone,” Jian Ghomeshi, a CBC Radio host, said outside the national broadcaster's headquarters, across the street from the convention centre where the leaders will meet. As if on cue, a pair of military helicopters chuffed overhead. Moments later, a blue wave of police officers washed around Mr. Ghomeshi on the sidewalk.

A few metres to his north, another scene seemed to speak silently for many: larger-than-life promotional portraits of two of the country's best-known TV funny men, Brent Butt and Rick Mercer, smirking at each other across John Street, over a long line of horses' behinds protruding from police trailers.

Mr. Basnayake was less amused than curious as he gestured across the street at a group of officers huddled at a corner. “Why are there 10 policemen there?” he asked. “What are they actually doing?”

Many were likely digesting snacks, healthy and otherwise, dispensed from golf carts by police logistics workers; small but tasty morsels of the billion-plus dollars Ottawa is spending on the summit.

Less savoury to Terry Beauchamp, owner of the tailor shop where police have been browsing but not buying, is the estimated $30,000 loss he expects to eat by the time this is all over.

“It doesn't sit well,” Mr. Beauchamp said, as employees undressed a pair of mannequins in a window display. Protective boards will be installed over the glass before the weekend, but the mannequins are being taken out just in case.

Mr. Beauchamp recalled the relatively quaint inconvenience of Toronto's G7 summit in 1988, during which he simply closed up shop for three days. This time, he'll lose more than a week's business, shell out for extra security and hope those boards hold up as he leaves town for the weekend.

“I'm getting out of Dodge,” said the merchant, who also lives near the security zone. “I'm getting on a plane to Thunder Bay.”

Those left behind, like Solomon Araya, will have little choice but to endure. Mr. Araya, a 43-year-old parking attendant, left war-torn Ethiopia for Italy in the 1980s, then settled in Canada.

As he surveyed his half-empty lot – an oddity since a Blue Jays ball game was on at the nearby Rogers Centre – he said all the armed men downtown remind him of the killings in his town when he was a kid.

“But now that's over,” Mr. Araya said, adding that he expects nothing nearly so drastic in Toronto.

“Toronto's very nice; the people are nice,” he said. “That's what I like about it – they just find their own way.”

With reports from Ann Hui and freelancer Ian Merringer

Un scientifique amateur travaille sur un réacteur de fusion nucléaire

Encore une fois, nous constatons que le vrai progrès technologique est fait par des individus motivés et libres, et non des 'comités d'experts'.

Via New York Daily News:

Gucci web designer Mark Suppes builds homemade nuclear reactor in Brooklyn warehouse

BY RICH SCHAPIRO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Originally Published:Wednesday, June 23rd 2010, 3:53 PM
Updated: Wednesday, June 23rd 2010, 3:53 PM

By day, he's a freelance computer programmer, building a Web site for fashion giant Gucci.

At night, he bikes to a nondescript Brooklyn warehouse, where he says he's building something with a bit more oomph - a homemade nuclear fusion reactor.

Meet Mark Suppes, an amateur scientist from Bedford-Stuyvesant who believes he can help save the world.

"I was inspired because I believed I was looking at a technology that could actually work to solve our energy problems," Suppes, 32, told the BBC.

Suppes says he has developed a working fusion reactor, a device that combines atoms to create energy.

Some see nuclear fusion as the holy grail of energy, a clean, cheap power source that doesn't rely on radioactive material.

Suppes' science project is legal and not considered dangerous - but people who live near the Bedford-Stuyvesant warehouse on Park Ave. where Suppes performs experiments aren't convinced.

"What if something goes wrong? There's a gas station two blocks away," said Geanine Robinson, 35, who lives in the Marcy Houses across the street from the warehouse.

Suppes began constructing his reactor two years ago, using $35,000 worth of parts he got on eBay.

He bought an additional $4,000 worth of parts with money he raised from investors and hopes to create a more sophisticated reactor.

The goal is to build a device that could produce more energy than it takes to power it - a conundrum that has hampered scientists for some 50 years.

"The attractiveness of the fusion reaction is you don't produce large quantities of radioactive materials," said Charles Sparrow, professor emeritus of chemical engineering at Mississippi State University. "But to have enough of these reactions to produce energy that's significant is what we've been working on for a long time."

La citation du jour

One would think that with the unqualified collapse of the Soviet Union, the transformation of China into a quasi-capitalist state, and the pitiful condition of satellites such as North Korea and Cuba, there would be little intellectual justification for any system reliant upon centralized planning of resources or the redistribution of income.

Yet that is not the case, for there is a strong human instinct for tribal culture, wherein the group is revered over the individual.

-Bill Baker, The Daily Reckoning

La diète socialiste de Hugo Chavez

Via Antagoniste.net:

Chavez pushes Venezuela into food war

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has pushed his country into a perilous food war that has seen prices rocket amid shortages and scandal over shipments left rotting at the docks.

by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Published: 4:03PM BST 23 Jun 2010

Venezuelan bishops gave warning yesterday that the consequences of President Chavez's drive to control the distribution of food would be to jeopardise supplies to ordinary citizens.

Church leaders said the failure of the state-owned PDVAL, a subsidiary of the national oil company, to distribute food imports that rotted at the shores was "a sin that Heaven is crying over."

Several thousands tons of rotting meat was among 80,000 tons left to go bad at the Puerto Cabello seaport.

One local worker said that the stench at the docks indicated the meat had been festering for weeks. He said: "It stank like 100 dead dogs."

The scandal emerged just weeks after Mr Chavez launched an "economic war on the bourgeoisie owners" of supermarkets, mills, rice plants and food distribution companies.

The "battle for food" coincided with a botched devaluation in January that pushed up the cost of imports.

The result has been an economic catastrophe in the only Latin American economy in recession. Inflation leapt to 21 per cent in May as food prices rose 41 per cent over the level of a year ago. Soldiers have been deployed to raid private homes for food stores. Long lines regularly form on streets for basic commodities.

Mr Chavez is undeterred by failure. Last week he relaunched a chain of supermarkets his government had expropriated from a French-Colombian joint venture. He boasted that the 40-strong chain, Bicentennial Supplies, was already operating at a higher profit margin that under Western management.

The former paratrooper, who is an avowed fan of Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean dictator, and Fidel Castro, Cuba's Communist tyrant, boasted that he has launched a new era of socialist supremacy. He said:

"Socialism is necessarily better than capitalism across the board and, that's what we're proving,"

The shortages have a sharp drop in Mr Chavez's popularity ratings to 45 per cent a rare poll in March, from more than 70 per cent three years ago. "I am so fed up with these food shortages," one shopper who had failed to reach the head of a queue for sugar reportedly said. "People get desperate and start behaving like animals."

As complaints grow louder Mr Chavez has turned on the few remaining bastions of opposition in the country he has led since 1999. Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of Globovision TV network, was forced to flee the country last month after he was charged with offending Mr Chavez by spreading false information.

The Caracas regime has threatened to move against billionaire Lorenzo Mendoza, owner of the Emprasas Polar, which owns the last significant supermarket rival to the Cuban-inspired state system. It has rejected Mr Chavez claims that it is profiteering from hoarding of food as "absurd and senseless."

But the 55-year old leader regularly threatens Mr Mendoza on his weekly television show Alo Presidente. "Mendoza if you keep messing around I'm going to take Polar away from you, every last plant," he said in March.

Venezuelan suffering has not hurt the overseas adoration that Mr Chavez attracts. Ken Livingstone, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bolivian leader Evo Morales are avowed cheerleaders for Mr Chavez in his confrontation with capitalism.

Oliver Stone, the US film director, will this week publish South of the Border, a documentary about Latin America that critics described as a hagiography of Mr Chavez.